Game crashes to desktop at community lot during winter
Hello. I have an issue that's been plaguing my game ever since I upgraded to a high end computer on a Windows 11. Every time it's winter and the ground starts to get frosty, my game crashes when I try to open up a community lot. The game is perfectly fine and smooth in every other season, but in winter, it starts to get wonky. I've tested this in a brand new save file with no custom content in it, and the game does the same thing. For some reason, if I turn off Reshade in my test file, it's alright. But when I turn off Reshade in my main save file, it crashes again, so I don't believe Reshade is the main cause.
My GPU is a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super. I've done the following already:
- Alder Lake patch
- Run As Administrator and in compatibility mode
- Updated drivers and C++
- Updated graphics rules and graphics cards text files in the program files
- Limited FPS using NVIDIA control panel and turned on vertical sync
- Limited CPU cores to only let Sims 3 access two cores (the problem was going on even when I was letting it use all of my computer's cores)
Again, the game runs perfectly fine otherwise and it's only doing this in winter. I don't believe the issue is in custom content since the game will immediately crash during winter in a save file with no CC as well. On my old gaming laptop (Windows 10), the game never did this. So I'm curious if this is a Windows 11 issue. But I've seen other people run Sims 3 perfectly fine on Windows 11 so I would rather not have to downgrade my OS and re-install everything.
I do get exceptions and script errors, but I've since deleted them. I can attach some when the game next generates them but in the meantime, I am curious if there's anything else I can try. As a note, this is actually my second install of Sims on this computer. I had to uninstall and reinstall the game because I ran into a similar problem during winter and tried executing the Alder Lake patch and for some reason, that deleted some core dll. In any case, this is not the first time encountering the winter crash issue and reinstalling did not work.
Thank you.
I figured it out and will put it here in case someone else makes the same mistake as me. In my defense, I've been using a laptop my whole life and this is my first time owning a PC... It turns out that when I set up the display, I didn't set it to the fancy graphics card inside. So for months, I've been gaming on an Intel graphics card worse than my gaming laptop. I'm honestly impressed considering how many graphics-intensive games I play for my job and stuff. Thanks, The Sims 3! Anyway, the game is running fine now in winter and on community lots because it's actually using my proper graphics card. I don't quite understand why the crash log analyzer kept claiming it was just custom content, but I'm too happy to have figured it out to care!
